Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Banny Chow walking across street towards her Honda, she perks up when I tell her I'm listening to Russian. Language is her world. Yesterday, airport in San Diego--leaning back against wall, playing. Older woman in wheel chair, beautiful African face and calm eyes, I see her ask to be seated nearby. She sings along... All dressed in white, as if for church, en route to Dallas. Missy Brown? Was that her name? I so wish I'd written it down...

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

23 June 2010. Beresteczko, the Polish spelling--and an entirely different vision of the past. The kresy--borderlands--a pilgrimage from within. Figures in a ruined church, arcs of worn brick, columns of dust. One high window filled with light...

Monday, June 21, 2010

21 June 2010. Chapel at Tomaszgrod, the ogee curve. Erect perpendiculars from the diagonal, at midpoints of each of the curves, to intersect perpendiculars from the upper and lower horizontals (to which the curves will be tangent). The intersections of these perpendiculars will be centers for circles of which the ogee curves are segments...

Language of geometry--clarity and order, proceeding step by step. The cloak of Squadron Commander Pavlichenko--"like a gloomy banner" riding in front. Heroism and violence, banners of history...

Friday, June 18, 2010

18 June 2010. Volhynian chapel, Tomaszgrod, restored to a creamy tan--just enough umber to make it look dim, set against once-white pilasters and columns. The metal awning, mounted on wrought-iron braces, as flimsy and of today as the fenders of the snow-splashed Vespa parked in front. Reinforced concrete power stanchion, winter sky, two figures to the left in dark clothes and knit caps, alongside another vehicle--bus or truck of some kind...

Here--people in a field. Gypsies, perhaps? Are there still such? Woman with short jacket wrapped around her shoulders, traditional skirt. A Godard film, from 1962, set much too far to the east. More Andrzei Wajda...

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Names with sounds, lines with meanings, a blunted pencil figuring the form in each curve, understood as gesture, the weight of reaching... His Eye Is On The Sparrow, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, or, holding two young children, the voice of Ethel Waters...

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

16 June 2010. Molokan, an older man with scythe, Russian harvest. Their settlement in the Valley of Guadalupe, Baja California... Grape vines and olive trees...

From an article in the Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1907:

There are about 2,000 Molokane at present living in this city. They have wearied of city life and its limitations and many temptations for the young people of the colony. For months the dream of the Russians has been a tract of land in the sister republic, where they could worship according to their peculiar tenets and live a semi-community life. Philip H. Shubin, Abraham G. Desatoff and Efim A. Urin, three patriarchal elders, went to view the promised land. Tracts on the east and west coast were surveyed, but according to Hack, no immediate decision was made.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

15 June 2010. Anatole Kuragin, in a sertyuk. His pleasant smile--"now begins the amusement"--picking up on Prince Bolkonsky's intended demolishment, and laughing right along. Unflappable, a word from another age. "I was on the list," (the list to avoid military service), turning now to his father, "now, papasha, just what was I down for...?" All seriousness vaporized in these moments of applied mirth, laughter barely surpressed. Kundera's incredible lightness of being--probably very much misunderstood on my part--for what else can one DO in the face of this enslaught of reason and duty. Slava--the word itself--as in Slav--all glory and rightness and glory...

Monday, June 14, 2010

14 June 2010. Tachanka, a teaching thereof. Gruff words and military terms-- Makhno and Budyonny, names from a stubbled past. The ruts and gullies of a burned countryside, where "ruined churches glow on the hills" and "narrow-shouldered Jews hover sadly at crossroads..."

A gift from my teacher--Carl Proffer, perhaps more than he realized, the quick pencil checks to the left of particular stories--Pan Apolek, the Road to Brody, My First Goose...

Friday, June 11, 2010

11 June 2010. Ancient Danish woman with sunglasses tilted back on her head, bending over copier, perplexed but winning smile...

La Belle Helene, her entry into Pierre's life, bending over in low-cut gown to look carefully at a snuff box from Anna Pavlovna's dotty aunt. He'd prefer, of course, to have joined the other table, where affairs of the world are under discussion--the Tsar's new alliance with the Prussian King, against "the enemy of mankind..." But, detained by the view, impossibly so--and given that he's Pierre, he decides he must marry her on the spot...

Passage marked in 1965, on first reading. But it's the following paragraph-the beginnings of Pierre's doubt--that I found myself marking late last night...

Thursday, June 10, 2010

10 June 2010. Solano soldier. Twenty five years of service in the army of Alexander I. Whose childhood name, after all, was Sasha. Sasha, like all the other Sashas--a flop of blond hair, military dress in play, the first wooden bayonette...

He (the soldier) returns to marry the sister of Sergei Aksakov. Their small home, the garden, animals. A marmot, even, who'd hide under the bed, darting out to steal the old soldier's slippers.

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

8 June 2010. Four hats and a bird. Morning sounds. An impossible leaf blower somewhere in the middle distance--winds of industry.

Listening to Aryeh Leib as he expounds on the fine points of Benya Krik's rise to fame. Kak eto delalos' v Odesse. How it was done in Odessa. The Russian, with its particular twists and turns--pauses and pilings-up, and a sweet irony throughout. Here we encounter neither pragmatism nor guilt, just a river of song. Well, more a stream--one with lots of rocks, and some deeper pools, breem hiding in the shadows, and a few seemingly aimless minnows darting about just under the surface...

Monday, June 07, 2010

7 June 2010. Reading Babel' in the car. Say that again? Reading Babel' in the car, 7-eleven lot, fairly early, with all the appropriate street noise and passers-by. (Go to the people, Gorky said.) A small woman swings by, American jeans and a foreign air...

Benya Krik and the "poltora zhida"--Jew-and-a-half, in old Odessa...

Last night, late--with Prince Andrei again, on the edge of the battlefield, Austrian town below, swarming with French troops. Battery commander Tushin--the true hero to date--holding his own under the relentless fire of ten enemy cannon...

Sunday, June 06, 2010

4 June 2010. Two young deer at top of Stockton--brown with white, appearing in early evening...mother just ahead...

Filming of War and Peace--Soviet-era production, with all due assistance from the Red Army. Field trucks, open-backed, from which emerge a clump of dragoons. Later--close up of woman's hands, attaching a small, bristly moustache,,,

O, tsen', v kotoroj videm ruzhnyx lyudej--cegodnya i vchera...

Kinds of hats--low brim and the hugh plume. Reflective of an age. The loan, made in 1913, in Mozyr--to someone in the family--to open a hat store, as it were...

About Me

The painter Anthony Dubovsky was born in San Diego, California, in 1945. He studied with Willard Midgette at Reed College, and has lived in Warsaw, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, and Jerusalem. "An exploration in which the goal becomes a part of the discovery..." You can reach him at anthonydubovsky.com